FIRSTLOOK: “But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise”

by HG Masters

“But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa” is the third iteration of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s UBS Map Global Art Initiative, which has acquired more than 125 works from 37 artists to date following previous focuses on South and Southeast Asia and Latin America. Curated by Sara Raza, with 17 artists, “But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise” is titled after a line from German cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1940 essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” as well as a 2014 mixed-media work by Rokni Haerizadeh in which the artist painted directly onto news images, transforming already dramatic scenes into quasi-mythological ones. Several threads run throughout many of the exhibited works, particularly a shared, critical interest in how modernist architecture and urban planning did, and did not, shape the Middle East and North Africa’s cities and their residents’ lives. Reflecting a region still very much in transformation following colonial rule, many of the artworks’ material forms were precarious and fragile, things on the brink of destruction. In her opening remarks Raza noted that there’s plenty of what she called “conceptual contraband” and “ideas that have been smuggled in,” and that she hoped the works’ permanent residency in the Guggenheim’s collection would be material for future scholars looking at a complicated region. Here is a first look at the artworks as installed at the Guggenheim in New York.

ROKNIHAERIZADEH’s But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise (2014), watercolor on 24 printed images. Image courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo and copyright by Rokni Haerizadeh. Unless otherwise noted, all images are by ArtAsiaPacific.

Part of HAERIZADEH’s series as it is installed on a corner of the Level 5 gallery.

ALAYOUNIS’s Plan for Greater Baghdad (2015) comprises this vitrine and a series of inkjet prints on the walls that narrate the story of a Le Corbusier-designed structure in the center of the Iraqi capital. Several of the protagonists, including Saddam Hussein and a Mickey Mouse head-wearing figure, are seen here in a diorama in front of the modernist gymnasium.

The second piece to reference Le Corbusier, KADERATTIA’s Untitled (Ghardaïa) (2009) is a reconstruction, here in couscous, of the Algerian city of Ghardaïa, whose ancient Mzab architecture was an unacknowledged influence on both Le Corbusier and Fernand Pouillon. Behind it, to the right, are nine drawings on tracing paper by SUSANHEFUNA, inspired by walking the city-grid of New York’s streets.

ABBASAKHAVAN’s cast bronzes of plants native to the Tigris and Euphrates river systems, in Study for a Monument (2013–16), are delicately arranged—again like contraband or perhaps in a funereal ritual—on cotton sheets placed on the gallery floor.

One part of ERIN ÇAVUŞOĞLU’s drawing-in-space, Dust Breeding (2015), as it is installed in the rotunda gallery. There is a close-circuit camera on the wall behind, which captures the scene (the outline of the work is based on a cement factory in Turkey) and flattens the image on the monitor so that it appears that visitors are standing inside the drawing.

Also floating in space is HASSANKHAN’s brass sculpture, Bank Bannister (2010), a doppelganger of the one outside the Banque Misr, the first Egyptian-owned financial institution, which is still extant in its original form in Cairo. In the background are two works: an aerial view of a ravaged-looking Beirut by ALICHERRI, and AHMEDMATER’s digital prints and video showing Mecca seen from the interior of a Saudi army helicopter.

Resembling a rocket or column—accompanied by the phrase “Column from the Great Colonnade of the Newly Founded Samarra,” this copper and aluminum sculpture by IMANISSA, Heritage Studies #10 (2015), is a part of a series of works drawn from museum objects about the region’s history. In the background is Beirut-based duo JOANAHADJITHOMAS and KHALILJOREIGE’s Latent Images, Diary of a Photographer, 177 Days of Performances (2015), 354 copies of book and a performance video, all based around the unseen rolls of film taken by the fictitious photographer Abdallah Farah, which capture Beirut’s transformation.

One of the leading conceptual figures of the United Arab Emirates, MOHAMMEDKAZEEM created this ten-meter-long scroll, Scratches on Paper (2014), marked like a musical score with a pair of scissors.